CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rtwitter
Jason
Jason

Reputation: 2884

Automating authentication with the twitteR package

I am running a twitter sentiment analysis in R and have followed the examples from the twitteR package in setting up the OAuth parameters like so:

library(ROAuth)
library(twitteR)
library(RCurl) 
options(RCurlOptions = list(cainfo = system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem", package = "RCurl")))


reqURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token"
accessURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token"
authURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize"
consumerKey <- "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
consumerSecret <- "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

twitCred <- OAuthFactory$new(consumerKey=consumerKey,
                             consumerSecret=consumerSecret,
                             requestURL=reqURL,
                             accessURL=accessURL,
                             authURL=authURL)
twitCred$handshake()
registerTwitterOAuth(twitCred)

I also want to maintain the authentication in the R environment so that I do not need to do the handshake every time I start and load this script. For instance, I run this piece of code and save the environment. Then upon restarting R to run functions such as searchTwitter, I get this error:

Error in twInterfaceObj$doAPICall(cmd, params, "GET", ...) : 
  OAuth authentication is required with Twitter's API v1.1

I thought that the registerTwitterOAuth(twitCred) is what saves my authentication details in the R environment but I guess I am wrong. If I do everything manually, the authentication as well as my twitter scraping works fine but I want to move towards automating this script on a linux server eventually.

What must I do so that the authentication stays in the R environment so that I can run automated scripts?

I am running R v.3.1.1 x64 on a Windows 7 x64 machine.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 352

Answers (2)

petermeissner
petermeissner

Reputation: 12860

Also you might havre a look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29505711

In addition to hrbrmstr suggesion of saveing credentials in your very own user folder outside of the script doing the work! ... consider this for 'headless' authentication:

library(httr)
options("httr_oauth_cache"=FALSE)

# 1. Find OAuth settings for twitter:
#    https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/oauth
oauth_endpoints("twitter")

# 2. Register an application at https://apps.twitter.com/
#    Make sure to set callback url to "http://127.0.0.1:1410"
#
#    Replace key and secret below
myapp <- oauth_app("twitter",
  key = "fookey",
  secret = "foosecret"
)

# 3. Get OAuth credentials
access_token="footoken"
access_secret="footokensecret"

twitter_token <-
  Token1.0$new(
    endpoint      = NULL,
    params        = list(as_header = TRUE),
    app           = myapp,
    credentials   = list(
      oauth_token = access_token,
      oauth_token_secret = access_secret
    )
  )


# 4. Use API
req <- GET("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json",
  config(token = twitter_token))
stop_for_status(req)
content(req)

Upvotes: 0

hrbrmstr
hrbrmstr

Reputation: 78822

Something like:

save(twitCred, file="~/.twitteR_creds")

Then to get it back for future use:

load(""~/.twitteR_creds")
registerTwitterOAuth(twitCred)

(I'm using ~/.twitteR_creds on linux/OS X, but try to do something similar on Windows so your API keys/creds say out of the code area that you might end up sharing with others.

Upvotes: 1

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